Design

How To Manage Agile At Program and Portfolio Level

By Adrian Bridgwater, July 14, 2014

Dashboards and reports for predictable releases and long-term alignment

Agile portfolio management company Innotas has announced a cloud-based product for cost tracking and resource management. The tool integrates with a range of agile development software such as Atlassian JIRA.

CEO Kevin Kern says that his firm's new release is a better way to manage the Agile development process "at the program and portfolio level" to overcome several challenges — lack of visibility, loss of predictability, and limited cost tracking.

"We deliver configurable dashboards and reports for predictable releases, long-term alignment, and resource management helping to keep Agile development on track and on budget."

The Innotas Agile Portfolio Management solution delivers dashboards to analyze development team and project work, such as new features versus maintenance or strategic versus operational.

There is also financial and cost tracking, resource management, and time tracking, which helps provide capacity and demand planning capabilities, including "what-if" scenarios for insight into cross-team dependencies.

According to A.T. Kearney research, 23% of Agile projects have more than 200 people, causing poor understanding of cross-team dependencies. Most organizations use traditional (waterfall) business metrics to measure their active work and results against business objectives.

The challenge with Agile is that there is no standard process to map between Agile and waterfall projects — causing a gap between what development teams can provide and what management needs to know. Alignment and visibility are important in project management success. In fact, according to a recent Project Management Institute (PMI) study, high performing organizations are 2x more likely to have "high" alignment of projects to organizational strategy.

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